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0:01:16 The history of philosophy is really just the history of various teams
0:01:20 arguing about what’s good or true.
0:01:24 The Epicurean, the empiricist, the stoic, the skeptic,
0:01:29 the positivist, the pragmatist, you get the point.
0:01:33 I’m not an official member of any of these teams,
0:01:38 but if you asked me to pick mine, I’d go with the existentialists.
0:01:48 For me, existentialism was the last great philosophical movement,
0:01:54 and one reason for that is that it emerged at a transformational period in history,
0:01:57 the early to mid-20th century,
0:02:01 headlined by two devastating world wars,
0:02:05 and many of the existentialists were responding to that.
0:02:08 But another reason this movement became so popular is that
0:02:15 its leading proponents didn’t just write arcane academic treatises.
0:02:19 They wrote novels and plays and popular essays,
0:02:22 stuff that real people actually read,
0:02:25 and their ideas crossed over into the culture.
0:02:33 People like Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir
0:02:37 wrote about freedom and responsibility and authenticity,
0:02:44 and their ideas still resonate because the human condition is the same as it’s always been.
0:02:46 But every historical moment is unique,
0:02:50 and so the question is always, how does this tradition,
0:02:55 how does any tradition address our world in the here and now?
0:03:02 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:03:15 [Music]
0:03:18 Today’s guest is Natalie Itoke.
0:03:21 She’s a professor at the Cooney Graduate Center
0:03:27 and the author of a terrific new book called Black Existential Freedom.
0:03:31 Sometimes I don’t know that I’m looking for a book until I see it,
0:03:33 and this one was like that.
0:03:40 Race and identity have been at the center of our discourse and politics for years now.
0:03:45 But this book engages with these issues through the lens of existentialist thought,
0:03:51 and it feels like a genuinely fresh way into some of these ongoing conversations
0:03:54 about history and racism and freedom.
0:04:00 Which is why I asked Itoke to talk to me about it.
0:04:01 And she did.
0:04:04 And I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
0:04:10 Natalie Itoke, welcome to the show.
0:04:12 Thank you for having me.
0:04:15 I’m really excited to have this conversation with you.
0:04:21 And I think before we get to the story you want to tell in this book,
0:04:28 I’d like to do just a little philosophical table setting for the audience.
0:04:32 What does existentialism mean to you?
0:04:35 How do you approach this tradition of thought?
0:04:42 Well, I come from the French / Francophone schooling background.
0:04:45 So I was exposed to philosophy in high school.
0:04:51 Right away, I just found the questions that philosophers were asking very interesting.
0:04:53 I read Jean-Paul Sartre being a nothingness.
0:04:55 I read some Kierkegaard.
0:04:57 I read Camus.
0:05:03 So in general, questions of existence were always part of my thinking process.
0:05:09 But there’s something about existing as a black person
0:05:12 in the context of white supremacist capitalist society
0:05:16 and the overall idea of the dehumanization of black people.
0:05:24 Which thinkers like Du Bois, Fanon, Ralph Ellison also helped me think about.
0:05:29 So you have the traditional existentialist school when you think about the white thinkers.
0:05:34 But honestly, when you think about African writers and diasporic African writers
0:05:38 who did not present themselves as philosophers,
0:05:44 you continuously have them engaging the question of existing as a black person.
0:05:48 Those writers don’t have to label themselves existentialists.
0:05:49 You know, academics, that’s our job.
0:05:54 We create boxes and categories because for some reason we’ve been trained to think
0:05:58 that if we don’t come up with a taxonomy, we cannot be analytical.
0:06:01 Of all those great lights in that tradition,
0:06:07 which of the thinkers, which of the writers spoke to you most personally?
0:06:10 Oh, the question of freedom is essential to me.
0:06:18 So when Sartre talks about this idea that to exist as a human being,
0:06:23 all human beings are condemned to freedom, that speaks to me right away.
0:06:30 When Sorin Cochegard describes anxiety being the vertical, the dizziness of freedom,
0:06:36 that also speaks to me directly because I always think about what does it take
0:06:40 to be free in the context of slavery, for instance.
0:06:46 The issue is not freedom necessarily, it’s the consciousness of your freedom
0:06:51 and knowing what you have to risk and what you can lose in the process of trying to be free.
0:06:57 So reading people like Cochegard and also to a certain extent,
0:07:01 Aldo Camus never really said that he was a philosopher of the absurd,
0:07:03 absurd in French.
0:07:07 The question of what, how do you find meaning?
0:07:10 The question of meaning and meaninglessness.
0:07:14 Again, thinking about oppression.
0:07:23 What gives meaning to your life when it looks like freedom is totally out of reach?
0:07:29 The last episode we recorded, actually, it was on Camus who I wrote my dissertation on.
0:07:36 And I know he, he insisted he was neither an existentialist nor a philosopher, but he was both.
0:07:38 I don’t care what he says, he was both.
0:07:39 We claim it, we claim it.
0:07:40 That’s right.
0:07:43 He’s on our team, whether he wants to be or not.
0:07:44 You know, it’s so interesting.
0:07:53 All of the existentialists were obviously committed to and concerned with freedom and responsibility.
0:07:53 Yes.
0:07:55 And that’s partly what people dig about it.
0:07:59 But I always feel, I’m curious if you feel the same way,
0:08:05 there’s a tendency to focus too much on the freedom part and not enough on the responsibility part.
0:08:10 Because if you take seriously the idea that we’re truly free,
0:08:17 then you’re immediately confronted with other questions like, what are we to do with that freedom?
0:08:19 What responsibilities does it carry?
0:08:23 And what happens when we flee those responsibilities?
0:08:29 I just love that the existentialist took those questions so seriously.
0:08:32 That’s also one of the reasons why they work with me.
0:08:37 Because, you know, there are ways in which in the Western framework,
0:08:41 people will talk about human rights in French.
0:08:44 The people will talk about the founding fathers.
0:08:49 So they have those lofty interpretations of freedom.
0:08:54 And it seems like freedom is something, yes, you fought for it, you gain it.
0:08:59 And then you sit down, usually a bunch of white males.
0:09:02 You sit down and you put something in paper.
0:09:06 But when you’re coming from the Haitian perspective,
0:09:09 when you think about Nick Turner, when you think about Fredric Douglas,
0:09:11 when you think about all these people,
0:09:14 it’s really about the question of responsibility.
0:09:17 And it starts with the individual and then it becomes collective.
0:09:23 You don’t have this conflict or discrepancy between freedom and responsibility.
0:09:28 When you’re looking at freedom from the perspective of un-freedom,
0:09:30 you have to be responsible.
0:09:32 And now we’re getting into your book,
0:09:36 which is about existentialism and the Black experience.
0:09:42 I mean, is there something unique about the historical Black experience
0:09:45 that makes it a good fit for existentialism?
0:09:48 Or maybe it’s better to reverse that a little bit and ask,
0:09:50 is there something about the historical Black experience
0:09:55 that informs or expands existentialist philosophy?
0:10:00 Yes, the question that I really ask is the following one.
0:10:07 What does it mean to be human when you’ve been historically dehumanized?
0:10:10 And regardless of where you find yourself on this globe,
0:10:14 you will see that people with darker skin are at the bottom.
0:10:19 So there’s something about this legacy of dehumanization
0:10:23 that creates an existential tension.
0:10:27 Of course, it manifests differently depending on where you find yourself.
0:10:30 So I was born in Paris, France,
0:10:33 but I was raised in Cameroon, Central Africa.
0:10:35 And I grew up there.
0:10:41 So I never thought of me as being non-human or as being Black.
0:10:48 But once you move to a space where the majority population is white
0:10:50 and the interaction you have with people
0:10:52 make you realize that you are the other,
0:10:55 although you never really see yourself as being the other,
0:10:59 you realize that although race is a racial construct,
0:11:01 it’s a lived experience.
0:11:04 For whatever reason, even in this country,
0:11:09 citizenship is not enough to be part of the nation.
0:11:14 Once you’ve been defined as non-human,
0:11:17 what can you tell to those who think that they are human
0:11:19 what it means to be human?
0:11:23 Because what they don’t realize is that they too have done something to their humanity.
0:11:26 Fanon wrote about it, Césaire wrote about it.
0:11:29 It says, “And I’m paraphrasing that to dehumanize the others,
0:11:31 they dehumanize oneself.”
0:11:34 So the question of dehumanization/being human
0:11:38 is still at the core of Black existential thought.
0:11:41 I have to be honest, when I first started your book,
0:11:45 I think I had this maybe vague skepticism in the back of my mind.
0:11:48 I was thinking, why Black existentialism?
0:11:49 Why not just existentialism?
0:11:53 Because existentialism is about the universal human experience.
0:11:56 So what does it even mean to say Black existentialism?
0:11:59 But then your book very quickly drives home the reminder
0:12:02 that we have this tradition of Western thought
0:12:05 and part of the history of that tradition
0:12:08 is the devaluing of Black humanity.
0:12:11 And that dehumanization is part of the historical Black experience.
0:12:16 That sense of exile is part of that experience, in the West at least.
0:12:20 And so there’s just no way to engage with a tradition like this one
0:12:24 without also dealing with that history.
0:12:25 Exactly.
0:12:29 Even in the African context, you know, because we are conditioned
0:12:35 to think about the question of the human and racism only in racial terms.
0:12:41 But when you think about the fact that the banchanization of Africa
0:12:46 occurred in Germany in 1884
0:12:50 and that not a single person of African descent was invited.
0:12:55 So whatever countries we inhabit today,
0:13:01 they became our countries through the process of dispossession and imperialism.
0:13:05 So for instance, Cameroon, the way we spell it today,
0:13:12 came from Cameroas because the Portuguese were the first one to show up there.
0:13:15 And in Cameroas, they saw a lot of big shrimps.
0:13:17 So basically, I’m a big shrimp.
0:13:19 That’s, you know.
0:13:22 And to me, that’s the beginning of the humanization right there,
0:13:27 because people claim a land and they act as if the people they find
0:13:30 on that land are of no value.
0:13:32 So they rename the place.
0:13:34 They balkanize the entire place.
0:13:39 And there we are today still trying to make sense of those spaces.
0:13:44 So it’s not just white versus black.
0:13:46 It’s geopolitics.
0:13:50 It’s the political economy and the people who live there.
0:13:53 They’re going to be enslaved or they’re going to work for us.
0:13:55 And we’re going to use the land.
0:13:59 So it’s not just what we think about when we think about existence
0:14:00 from this universal perspective.
0:14:02 It’s not universal.
0:14:04 Yes, oppression happens everywhere.
0:14:08 But the outcome is very different depending on your positionality
0:14:10 in the in world history, you know.
0:14:14 Well, as you say in the book, you’ve been air quotes black
0:14:16 on three different continents.
0:14:19 In this part of the book and your experiences,
0:14:22 maybe the most interesting and clarifying for me.
0:14:26 So I do want to linger on it for a little bit.
0:14:30 How does your sense of self vary from one place to another?
0:14:36 And what are those differences say about how identity and race
0:14:39 and culture really work?
0:14:43 Yes, my parents met in Paris because they’re part
0:14:45 of the colonial/postcolonial experience.
0:14:50 At the time, it was very common for French-speaking colonized
0:14:54 Africans to end up in France.
0:14:58 After they were done with college, they moved back to Cameroon.
0:15:01 And I was, what, two or three years old?
0:15:05 So I did not have the time to develop a racial consciousness
0:15:09 in France because I basically became whoever I became
0:15:13 as a human being in Cameroon, a country where,
0:15:18 because the majority population is black, everybody is black,
0:15:20 therefore no one is.
0:15:25 So you don’t have to think about race.
0:15:28 Yes, you see white people, but they’re a minority
0:15:33 and they do not disrupt your everyday life.
0:15:37 So when I think about police brutality, for instance,
0:15:40 the first image of police brutality,
0:15:46 it’s the oppressive Cameroonian police state oppressing
0:15:48 other Cameroonian.
0:15:50 So I have more of a class consciousness
0:15:56 because wealth disparities in Sub-Saharan Africa are just
0:15:57 unbelievable.
0:16:01 Fast forward, I moved to France to go to college.
0:16:06 You move to a majority white country.
0:16:08 And although French is the language
0:16:11 that I always spoke with my parents,
0:16:14 people start complimenting you on your French.
0:16:22 So it’s a little bit odd, or people start wondering,
0:16:25 why is it that maybe you’re smart or you know certain things
0:16:28 and they ask you, are you God there?
0:16:32 So at first, it’s not really an understanding of blackness,
0:16:35 per se, from this academic perspective.
0:16:38 It’s really the kind of question you’re being asked.
0:16:39 And also the fact that in Cameroon,
0:16:44 yes, we talked about colonization in history course,
0:16:46 but we did not really dwell on that.
0:16:47 So I moved to France.
0:16:51 Then I realized that your way of understanding the world,
0:16:53 your way of understanding yourself,
0:16:56 goes through a certain kind of French ideological filter
0:16:58 that you are not aware of.
0:17:01 And also in France, we have what they call universalism,
0:17:03 a French universalism.
0:17:08 French people do not believe that race is real, per se,
0:17:11 or even a social construct.
0:17:15 They have a very strange approach to history.
0:17:17 So for instance, when I was in France,
0:17:21 they celebrated the abolition of slavery.
0:17:25 You see, the key word here is not slavery, it’s abolition.
0:17:30 And the focus was on victor shall share, or white abolitionists.
0:17:33 So at the end of the day, we were taught in condition
0:17:36 to celebrate this white guy.
0:17:39 And the history of black resistance in the French Caribbean
0:17:42 was totally repressed and erased.
0:17:45 And every time you brought up race,
0:17:48 people would not hear you.
0:17:51 So even in the French context, you see something is odd,
0:17:53 but you don’t have the tools to engage it
0:17:58 because society at large is living in a state of denial.
0:18:00 Then I moved to the US, and I discovered
0:18:04 what I call the Africana Library with all these African-American
0:18:05 thinkers.
0:18:10 And I operate a return to African history
0:18:14 and French colonization and identity
0:18:18 because I was exposed to this way of thinking about the self
0:18:20 in a historical context.
0:18:23 So these are kind of the three ways in which
0:18:27 I engage those spaces in my work.
0:18:30 Yeah, a relevant passage from your book
0:18:33 that I’ll just read if you don’t mind.
0:18:36 And now I’m quoting, “I don’t speak the language,
0:18:39 but I will never forget when I found out
0:18:43 that in Haitian Creole, the word “neg” does not mean black,
0:18:46 it means man, it means human.
0:18:49 And I was thinking, these people have something
0:18:53 that we lost because in Haiti, you can be a negre blanc.
0:18:56 You’re just a human who happens to be white.
0:18:58 This idea that these people who were enslaved
0:19:01 created a language where neg means human really
0:19:03 turned my world upside down.
0:19:07 Once you start thinking that way about that word
0:19:10 and the condition of being human from that perspective,
0:19:15 it really changes the conversation.”
0:19:16 That is fascinating.
0:19:18 How did that word and thinking about the condition
0:19:21 of being human from that perspective
0:19:24 change the conversation for you?
0:19:26 Well, it totally changed the conversation
0:19:32 because in French, the “en-word” is not necessarily
0:19:34 the word “neg.”
0:19:36 “Black” could be “negre.”
0:19:39 You’re just describing somebody’s skin color.
0:19:41 But then you also have phrases such like,
0:19:45 “travailler comme un negre” to work like an “en-word,”
0:19:49 which to me, you have to directly trace it back
0:19:54 to unpaid labor and being enslaved.
0:19:58 In the American context, you have this evolution
0:20:00 in terms of the tenementology.
0:20:02 So we know what the “en-word” is.
0:20:03 It’s a derogatory term.
0:20:05 But in the context of Haiti, we’re
0:20:12 talking about creole, a kind of language which, by definition,
0:20:18 has to do with hybridity and mixing different cultural
0:20:20 and linguistic legacy.
0:20:26 So you see that the word “neg,” “ne-g,” comes
0:20:29 from the French word “negre.”
0:20:33 But they totally reinvented the meaning of that word.
0:20:38 It wasn’t used to describe the condition of the enslaved
0:20:42 or an enslaved person.
0:20:45 It means human.
0:20:47 And there is no surprise.
0:20:52 That’s also where the first black republic was born.
0:20:56 So there’s something about Haiti, that word,
0:21:02 and the question of freedom that helped me revisit
0:21:07 the black experience in the context of oppression.
0:21:09 There’s another passage that I’m thinking of now,
0:21:12 and I’m going to read that as well.
0:21:14 Again, if you don’t mind–
0:21:15 Please go ahead.
0:21:17 You wrote– and now I’m quoting–
0:21:19 “What makes black existentialism very unique
0:21:23 is this situation of despair, and tragedy,
0:21:25 and ontological catastrophe that you constantly
0:21:29 have to engage, not only from an existentialist standpoint,
0:21:32 but in the material conditions of your life.”
0:21:34 So when I look at the ways black immigrants are treated,
0:21:37 whether we’re talking about Europe or America today,
0:21:43 I ask, what is there that makes their exclusion unique?
0:21:45 What is your answer to that question?
0:21:48 What does it mean for you to exercise freedom
0:21:50 in the context of oppression?
0:21:52 And how is that different from exercising freedom
0:21:56 when you occupy the favored or dominant position
0:21:57 in a society?
0:21:58 It’s very simple.
0:22:02 For people who are oppressed, and this is not just black people,
0:22:04 freedom is in the struggle.
0:22:06 The victory is in the struggle.
0:22:08 Nothing will be given to you.
0:22:10 You have to fight for it.
0:22:14 Once you surrender to your circumstances, you defeat it.
0:22:18 So people can look at black immigrants
0:22:20 and come up with all kind of narratives.
0:22:23 But personally, from an existential perspective,
0:22:26 I see a certain kind of struggle to be free.
0:22:29 The question is, that freedom cannot be
0:22:32 divorced from the material conditions of the people’s
0:22:33 lives.
0:22:41 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:22:44 After a short break, we’ll talk about avoiding
0:22:47 the traps of pessimism.
0:22:49 Stay with us.
0:22:52 [MUSIC PLAYING]
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0:26:28 There’s a term you use in the book, Afro-pessimism.
0:26:29 What does that refer to?
0:26:32 And is the argument you’re making in this book
0:26:36 opposed to this or is the relationship more complicated?
0:26:41 It’s very interesting because depending on the reader,
0:26:44 I get two different types of responses.
0:26:49 Some people read my work as a response to Afro-pessimism.
0:26:54 Other people read it as a way to engage Afro-pessimism
0:26:57 but from a different perspective.
0:27:02 But what Afro-pessimism does is basically focusing
0:27:07 on the fact that there is a continuous
0:27:12 and ongoing process of dehumanization
0:27:14 that people of African descent go through.
0:27:19 And in many ways, there’s no way we can be fully human
0:27:24 because we make everybody else human.
0:27:27 In other words, it’s the dehumanization
0:27:30 of people of African descent that makes other people human.
0:27:35 And they talk about a certain kind of ontological catastrophe.
0:27:40 So I do not necessarily disagree with that perspective
0:27:44 but I just reverse the paradigm.
0:27:49 I focus on the ongoing struggle for freedom.
0:27:53 So I’m not dismissing the reality of white supremacy.
0:27:55 I’m not dismissing the reality
0:27:58 of the dehumanization of black people.
0:28:03 I’m not dismissing the material conditions of our lives
0:28:06 but I’m looking at it from the perspective of those
0:28:11 who for a very long time had to fight in order to exist.
0:28:14 – But at the very beginning of the book,
0:28:19 you say explicitly that blackness is not synonymous
0:28:23 with victimhood.
0:28:26 Why was it important to state that so clearly?
0:28:30 – Well, because I think historically people of African descent
0:28:32 have been victimized.
0:28:37 So they are victims, but at the same time,
0:28:42 the other side of the story is that they always try
0:28:45 to find a way to free themselves.
0:28:47 I cannot separate the two.
0:28:52 So that’s why I draw the line between being historically
0:28:57 victimized and being a victim and the state of victimhood.
0:28:59 And in the work that I do,
0:29:03 I am not necessarily saying that that’s it.
0:29:07 They are free and it’s a difficult argument to make
0:29:11 but I’m trying to examine the ways in which you cannot think
0:29:16 about black freedom without this question of the struggle.
0:29:21 And it’s not even just in the US or in France
0:29:25 when I think about what’s happening in sub-Saharan Africa,
0:29:30 you know, the dictatorships and the many ways
0:29:35 in which neocolonialism and the setting up of a power structure
0:29:40 that still oppress Africans is happening at the moment.
0:29:44 People are still trying to be free.
0:29:47 So, and to me, I’m not just being pessimistic.
0:29:50 It’s just the facts of our black life.
0:29:55 It’s how you deal with it and continuously you still trying
0:29:59 to improve the conditions of your lives, right?
0:30:03 Whereas the Afro-Pessimists will say that, you know,
0:30:08 there’s no point talking about the struggle
0:30:10 because at the end of the day,
0:30:13 why should you even be struggling in the first place?
0:30:15 – Well, this is getting to the tension for me,
0:30:16 one of the tensions at least.
0:30:21 There is a certain pessimism to just stick with that word
0:30:26 that I feel in so much of the race discourse in America.
0:30:28 And I just don’t know what to do with it.
0:30:31 And I can try to explain what I mean.
0:30:37 So I’m a white guy who grew up in the deep South.
0:30:40 That’s just a fact about me.
0:30:43 And I’m not saying that in some performative perfunctory way.
0:30:46 I’m just acknowledging that that’s my experience.
0:30:50 And it places some kind of limit
0:30:52 on how much I can understand the experience
0:30:55 of someone with a totally different life.
0:31:00 But I also believe in the universality
0:31:02 of the human condition and the power of language
0:31:06 and ideas to bridge differences.
0:31:09 And when the pessimism goes too far
0:31:14 or when we become trapped in our given identities,
0:31:20 we sacrifice our agency on some level.
0:31:23 We sacrifice our ability to define ourselves
0:31:24 in the here and now
0:31:27 and project ourselves into a better future.
0:31:29 But at the same time, we are products
0:31:33 of material and historical forces.
0:31:37 How do we accept the all too real constraints
0:31:39 imposed on us by history
0:31:42 without at the same time reducing ourselves
0:31:45 to historical props?
0:31:49 I always go back to the lived experience
0:31:54 because African people or people of African descent
0:31:55 are not concepts.
0:32:01 I honestly believe that every day when someone wakes up,
0:32:04 they try to figure out what they have to do,
0:32:06 how to go about it.
0:32:09 And, you know, it’s not an academic matter.
0:32:11 It’s very concrete.
0:32:14 It doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be facing
0:32:17 difficulties, challenges, problems.
0:32:22 But you still go about your life
0:32:26 because that’s the life you were given to live, you know?
0:32:30 But I also think a little paraphrase Gramsci that,
0:32:32 you know, you need to strike a balance
0:32:35 between the pessimism of the intellect
0:32:38 and the optimism of the will.
0:32:42 Because looking at reality, to me,
0:32:45 is not a matter of being pessimistic or optimistic.
0:32:48 You need to be able to deal with reality.
0:32:51 Otherwise, there’s a flight from responsibility.
0:32:56 So once you’re able to look at a situation for what it is
0:32:59 and you don’t lie to yourself,
0:33:03 you’re able to look at death straight in the eyes,
0:33:04 you’re able to deal with it.
0:33:08 And this is not some grandiose philosophical statement.
0:33:11 I see that every time I go back to Cameroon,
0:33:13 coming from a perspective of somebody
0:33:16 who has lived most of her life overseas,
0:33:18 yes, you can come and be like, oh my God,
0:33:19 these people are suffering.
0:33:21 They don’t have this, they don’t have that.
0:33:25 So you can look at their daily lives
0:33:29 from a perspective of lack and deficiency.
0:33:32 But that is not how they’re living their lives.
0:33:37 They’re still trying to work whatever job they can do.
0:33:39 They’re still having children.
0:33:42 They’re still having a certain kind of joy.
0:33:44 Horrible things happen to them,
0:33:49 but they don’t sit in a state of pessimism and paralysis.
0:33:54 To the contrary, sometimes I wonder,
0:33:59 because I’m thinking, is this some kind of active nihilism?
0:34:04 Like you keep on pushing, just like Sisyphus,
0:34:06 to go back to Camus and the meat of Sisyphus.
0:34:08 It tells us that we have to imagine
0:34:12 that Sisyphus is happy and his happiness is in that rock
0:34:14 and the fact that he has the strength to push it.
0:34:15 But then at the same time,
0:34:20 I’m also fully aware that life could be so much better,
0:34:22 so much different.
0:34:25 If from a political standpoint,
0:34:27 what about redistributing the wealth
0:34:28 in a certain kind of way?
0:34:32 What about making sure that people have decent housing,
0:34:33 free healthcare?
0:34:36 So you see, that’s why I’m constantly engaging
0:34:38 the material conditions of our lives,
0:34:40 but at the same time,
0:34:45 I’m aware of the fact that people are continuously
0:34:48 also trying to improve the material conditions of our life,
0:34:50 but it’s not just up to the individual.
0:34:52 That’s what the political comes in.
0:34:55 And I cannot afford to be pessimistic also
0:34:58 because all the people who came before me
0:35:01 of what people of African descent in this country
0:35:05 had to endure and fight for and open the door.
0:35:09 When it seems like everything was dark
0:35:12 and there was no hope, you know?
0:35:16 So, and I also think about the freedom fighters in Cameroon.
0:35:18 All those people who believed in freedom
0:35:22 and who were killed, had those people not believe
0:35:25 and had they not fought, where would I be today?
0:35:28 So that’s where I also find a certain kind of hope.
0:35:29 – I love the line in the book
0:35:32 about people of African descent or Sisyphian,
0:35:33 whether they like it or not.
0:35:34 – Yeah.
0:35:38 – I love it because Sisyphus symbolizes
0:35:40 this dual reality that you’re talking about, right?
0:35:43 That suffering and loss are objective realities,
0:35:45 but so is the choice to affirm life
0:35:49 and make that goddamn boulder your own.
0:35:52 – Yeah, and honestly, I can look at it
0:35:53 from the aproposimist perspective
0:35:58 and I can totally understand how, you know, what’s the point?
0:36:02 – I mean, some of this gets at the ambivalence.
0:36:06 I felt reading someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates
0:36:10 who writes beautifully and in a way
0:36:14 that helps me understand his experience.
0:36:18 What I wrestled with was the philosophy of hopelessness
0:36:21 that seemed to undergird it.
0:36:22 On some level, I get it.
0:36:27 The black experience in America is perpetual struggle,
0:36:29 but I can’t help the fact that it strikes me
0:36:31 as a form of resignation.
0:36:34 I think it yields too much to the forces of oppression.
0:36:37 There’s no exit, as Sartre would say.
0:36:39 But I don’t know, do you think I’m misunderstanding
0:36:41 the point there?
0:36:43 – Well, yes and no, because remember
0:36:47 that people of African descent in the United States,
0:36:49 and I’m paraphrasing Baldwin here,
0:36:52 they are the only people who never want to come here.
0:36:55 So they didn’t come here because they had a dream
0:36:59 or they tried to improve their living conditions
0:37:01 and they’ve been through hell.
0:37:02 And they stay going through hell.
0:37:04 There’s a certain kind of legacy.
0:37:09 We’re talking about at least 250 years of free labor.
0:37:13 We’re talking about Jim Crow laws.
0:37:15 We’re talking about lynching.
0:37:19 So I cannot say that Ta-Nehisi Coates
0:37:21 is a preacher of hopelessness per se,
0:37:23 because in the United States,
0:37:27 there’s also this obsession with hope and happy endings,
0:37:30 which I do not have because I come from a French
0:37:32 slash Francophone background.
0:37:35 When you watch a French movie for an hour and a half
0:37:37 or two hours and the movie ends,
0:37:39 you’re just like, what happened here?
0:37:40 (laughs)
0:37:42 What did I just watch?
0:37:46 But you look at, American movies is,
0:37:48 you always have the dualities and the binaries,
0:37:51 the good guys and the bad guys.
0:37:55 And you always need an happy ending.
0:37:59 There’s this obsession with, we need to find hope.
0:38:00 Where is hope?
0:38:02 That’s why I love the blues,
0:38:05 because the blues is an African-American art form
0:38:11 that helps you deal with the dissonance of your existence.
0:38:14 And you cannot be in denial of your reality,
0:38:16 but you have to be responsible about it.
0:38:18 You can be humoristic about it.
0:38:20 You can have a sense of irony.
0:38:22 And when you listen to some blues songs,
0:38:26 you can see that the lyrics can be sad or tragic,
0:38:28 but the melody is upbeat.
0:38:32 What is the blues singer expressing?
0:38:34 Joy, happiness, hope?
0:38:36 Is expressing an existential struggle?
0:38:43 – I wonder what you think is the principal struggle today
0:38:49 and where freedom is to be found in that
0:38:52 for black people in this country at least,
0:38:53 ’cause that’s where we are.
0:38:58 – When you think about the ’60s and the ’70s,
0:39:02 the black struggle was not just for black people.
0:39:04 It was universal.
0:39:09 Most of those black leaders were Marxist or leftist.
0:39:11 They were also anti-capitalist.
0:39:14 It wasn’t just anti-racism.
0:39:16 I think the difficulty today
0:39:20 is not necessarily just the question of freedom,
0:39:25 is the fact that leftist politics,
0:39:27 first of all, is divided.
0:39:29 You have the cultural left
0:39:32 and then you have the left that focuses on class,
0:39:36 but also there is this neoliberalization
0:39:38 of identity discourse.
0:39:41 Therefore, the question I have is,
0:39:45 are we fighting or are we framing freedom
0:39:50 in terms of becoming part of a system
0:39:55 which by definition reproduced inequality?
0:39:57 If that’s what we’re claiming,
0:40:02 you’re going to create a minority elite class
0:40:06 and then they will be part of this world as it is,
0:40:09 but I am told that it is progress
0:40:12 because now you have more black people here,
0:40:14 more black people there,
0:40:17 or do you want to create a world
0:40:21 that is difficult to actually create
0:40:26 because we all have to lose and risk everything.
0:40:29 And I’m including there the black bourgeois.
0:40:30 (laughs)
0:40:32 So I think the question today
0:40:34 is not some abstract freedom.
0:40:38 It’s connected to the material conditions of our lives.
0:40:41 And it’s not an American problem,
0:40:43 but I think that in the US,
0:40:44 and maybe I’m biased
0:40:47 because I come from all these different spaces,
0:40:50 we are very used to just look at issues
0:40:53 from a certain parochial perspective.
0:40:55 Like we can fix problems
0:40:58 that are actually global locally.
0:41:00 No, it’s going to take more.
0:41:03 That is also the reason why the murder of George Floyd,
0:41:08 for instance, was used in Sub-Saharan Africa by activists
0:41:12 to challenge the police states and police brutality.
0:41:15 At first I thought it was odd
0:41:17 because of course in the US context,
0:41:20 you think about race and racism,
0:41:23 but then in the African context,
0:41:24 you think about, well,
0:41:27 the relationship between the state,
0:41:30 violence and disciplining citizens.
0:41:34 George Floyd belongs to a category of people
0:41:36 that Sylvia Winter wrote about
0:41:41 in her essay titled “No Human Involve”.
0:41:44 Basically, that was the qualifier
0:41:47 that the LAPD used in the ’90s
0:41:52 to describe an unemployed black male
0:41:56 who were involved in petty crimes, more or less,
0:42:00 and who were also high school dropout.
0:42:03 And she wrote that essay more than,
0:42:04 was it in the, it wasn’t in the ’90s,
0:42:07 it was after the Rodney King situation.
0:42:12 Asking black academics, what language can we use?
0:42:15 What type of framework can you create
0:42:20 to actually talk about the ratchet of the earth?
0:42:22 And she was talking about this specific class of people.
0:42:26 – You look at a movement like Black Lives Matter,
0:42:31 which in 2020 really gathered a lot of steam
0:42:33 and a lot of support,
0:42:36 but then you fast forward the clock
0:42:37 a few years into the future
0:42:40 and what did it yield materially?
0:42:43 Not much, the material conditions
0:42:46 of black people in this country
0:42:50 are not better than they were five years ago.
0:42:54 – Well, to me, I think the challenges today
0:42:55 are just very different.
0:43:00 So there are ways in which today
0:43:04 some people believe that capitalism
0:43:10 and activism can lead to some kind of freedom.
0:43:18 You have the neoliberalization of the black freedom struggle.
0:43:20 It’s not necessarily about the movement,
0:43:24 it’s about the dynamics of capitalism
0:43:28 in the context of the black freedom struggle.
0:43:33 Today, can we really have a genuine political movement
0:43:38 that does not in real concrete terms
0:43:42 address capitalism and the material conditions
0:43:44 in terms of your platform,
0:43:47 in terms of what you’re advocating for?
0:43:50 And I think that’s the tension today.
0:43:54 How do we reinvent grassroots organizing?
0:43:57 And when you have all those billionaires
0:44:01 giving money to movements,
0:44:05 is it an oxymoron to even combine the two?
0:44:08 Apparently not, but I think that’s also why
0:44:11 those movements are not successful per se.
0:44:14 I heard you say something along these lines
0:44:16 in another interview where you were talking about
0:44:20 how we engage the issue of identity in this culture,
0:44:23 that it’s all about who you are
0:44:27 instead of the relationship you have with other people.
0:44:31 – Yes, but the saddest thing is,
0:44:34 I don’t know, we can reverse the discourse
0:44:39 because it creates a certain kind of competition
0:44:41 amongst groups that are oppressed.
0:44:46 And then the conversation is, what is this fight really about?
0:44:51 Is it about freedom or access?
0:44:56 Because I don’t believe that I can be free by myself
0:44:59 or one group can be free,
0:45:02 whereas the other group is not free.
0:45:05 It’s very complicated when you have a society
0:45:09 that is organized with different groups.
0:45:12 Yes, you have the master categories, whiteness.
0:45:16 But whiteness is a name for so many things.
0:45:19 People are usually talking about wealth.
0:45:21 They’re talking about access.
0:45:26 They’re talking about things that are very concrete.
0:45:28 So what are people fighting for?
0:45:32 They’re fighting for access, for resources,
0:45:34 and you’re using identity
0:45:37 because that’s the way this society was built.
0:45:38 That’s why it’s also very difficult
0:45:41 to talk about solidarity sometimes.
0:45:43 – When you look around here
0:45:46 or anywhere else in the world for that matter,
0:45:51 do you see concrete examples of emancipatory politics
0:45:55 that we could actually build on?
0:45:57 – That’s a difficult question
0:46:00 because what is emancipatory politics?
0:46:06 For instance, I went to college in France, right?
0:46:08 And it was pretty much free.
0:46:11 And I also have free healthcare.
0:46:14 And a lot of European countries
0:46:17 promote a certain kind of social democracy.
0:46:20 So moving to the US
0:46:23 and looking at the ways in which here
0:46:27 you pretty much on your own for everything,
0:46:33 the European political context can look progressive,
0:46:38 but we also see that even there is not working anymore.
0:46:41 And I also see places where the states,
0:46:43 they basically do not care at all.
0:46:47 So I know this is going to sound strange
0:46:49 and I don’t know what it would look like,
0:46:51 but I think we need a global revolution.
0:46:55 It sounds very abstract,
0:47:00 but I will be a little bit dishonest if I were to tell you
0:47:03 this is working here and this is working there.
0:47:06 – You were talking earlier about
0:47:09 the various factions within the left.
0:47:14 And I suppose I’ve always been in the old school
0:47:18 materialist camp and the political frustration for me
0:47:24 when it comes to race is how often it’s used as a tool
0:47:27 to undermine the solidarity we actually need.
0:47:31 I guess this also gets to the political traps
0:47:33 of neoliberalism.
0:47:37 And it’s part of what makes fascism so vexing.
0:47:41 It weaponizes existing grievances
0:47:45 while at the same time reinforcing the conditions
0:47:49 that brought about those grievances.
0:47:52 And that’s the loop we’ve got to get out of.
0:47:53 – It’s funny, you’re bringing this up
0:47:55 two days ago in my class,
0:48:00 we had a conversation about race reductionism
0:48:04 versus class reductionism.
0:48:05 And I think that’s the problem.
0:48:08 I think they intersect.
0:48:11 You cannot necessarily separate the two.
0:48:15 The problem is when you start essentializing
0:48:20 each qualifier and it becomes either or
0:48:22 particularly in the American context.
0:48:25 You’re right, that’s also part of the problem.
0:48:32 – After one more short break,
0:48:36 hear more of my conversation with Natalie Itoque.
0:48:37 Stay with us.
0:48:39 (upbeat music)
0:48:58 – The white chocolate macadamia cream cold brew
0:49:00 is back for the summer at Starbucks.
0:49:02 So bold and so dreamy.
0:49:05 It’s the coolest co-pilot for wherever the sunshine takes you.
0:49:07 Embrace the chill.
0:49:10 The silky cold foam of that anticipated first sip.
0:49:13 And join us on summertime only at Starbucks.
0:49:17 – I’m Claire Parker.
0:49:19 – And I’m Ashley Hamilton.
0:49:22 – And this is Celebrity Memoir Book Club.
0:49:26 – A podcast that says what if your must read book list
0:49:29 and your absolutely must not read book list got married?
0:49:31 If you’ve ever seen a celebrity memoir
0:49:33 and thought what could they possibly write about?
0:49:35 – The answer a lot of times is nothing.
0:49:37 So we have to make up the jokes to fill in the blanks.
0:49:39 – Yeah, so if you wanna know what’s in there,
0:49:42 but you don’t wanna waste your eyeballs’ strength,
0:49:43 we’re gonna tell you what’s in it.
0:49:45 So hop along for the ride.
0:49:46 – Who are we?
0:49:47 We are two best friends and two comedians
0:49:50 who had enough time to read a full book a week.
0:49:51 – We live in New York,
0:49:53 so we think we know everything about everything
0:49:55 and we’re gonna tell you what’s what.
0:49:57 – And if we’re wrong, that’s part of the fun.
0:50:00 – So if you are interested in celebrities,
0:50:04 in literature, in a good time with your pals,
0:50:07 tune in to Celebrity Memoir Book Club.
0:50:08 – The podcast where we read the book
0:50:09 so that you don’t have to.
0:50:11 – You can listen to Celebrity Memoir Book Club
0:50:13 wherever you get your podcasts.
0:50:15 – I mean, can’t wait to hang.
0:50:20 – Basically every home in America has a refrigerator.
0:50:23 I mean, you have to have at least one refrigerator
0:50:24 if not more, right?
0:50:26 How else are you gonna keep your food fresh long enough
0:50:28 so you actually eat it?
0:50:30 – Not necessarily.
0:50:32 This episode of “Gastropod,”
0:50:34 how the future of refrigeration
0:50:36 might not involve refrigeration at all.
0:50:38 – These are untreated lemons.
0:50:40 So this is eight weeks old and these are the same age.
0:50:42 So these are treated and these are untreated.
0:50:43 – That’s nuts.
0:50:44 I mean, look at them.
0:50:45 – Pepper’s the same thing.
0:50:47 So untreated and then these are treated
0:50:49 and they’re both the same age.
0:50:51 You should feel it actually, I mean, they’re solid.
0:50:53 – Bell peppers nearly as good as new
0:50:55 after eight weeks at room temperature.
0:50:57 This is a new technology that could help address
0:50:59 one of the most serious offenders
0:51:01 when it comes to global warming, your fridge.
0:51:03 – “Gastropod” has got the story.
0:51:05 Find “Gastropod” and subscribe
0:51:07 wherever you get your podcasts.
0:51:20 – I often feel suspended between the deniers
0:51:23 and the pessimists.
0:51:28 The people who insist racism is a phantasm on the one hand
0:51:32 and the people who insist we can never get beyond it
0:51:33 on the other hand.
0:51:35 The deniers are fools.
0:51:39 And I think the pessimists are dead end.
0:51:42 But I ask you sincerely, as someone who’s thought
0:51:44 about this much more than I have, I mean,
0:51:48 do you think we’ll ever live in a world without racism
0:51:51 or at least a world in which racism is so irrelevant
0:51:55 and confined as to be politically inconsequential?
0:51:58 – No, I don’t think so.
0:52:02 And I’m not just talking about race.
0:52:07 I also come from a place where you have many people
0:52:09 who use the word ethnic groups,
0:52:11 but this is colonial language.
0:52:14 You have different peoples living together.
0:52:21 They share different languages, different cultures,
0:52:24 but the issue is not the difference.
0:52:26 It’s the struggle for resources and access.
0:52:31 So some of the conflicts in the African context
0:52:37 that are continuously framed in terms of ethnic conflicts.
0:52:41 People just fighting because they’re different
0:52:44 or they’re fighting over land or water
0:52:47 or some kind of resources.
0:52:52 And are they using race or the so-called ethnic identity
0:52:55 to create a sense of unity
0:53:00 so that they can bond in order to oppress other people,
0:53:03 i.e. have more resources?
0:53:06 You see, that’s how I think about those issues.
0:53:11 I will always bring into the conversation
0:53:16 the mechanism of power, exploitation and race.
0:53:18 And I will paraphrase Barbara Field.
0:53:19 – Yeah, she’s great.
0:53:24 – She talks about how, okay, racism is real,
0:53:27 but we should be aware of the fact
0:53:31 that people were not enslaved
0:53:32 so that they can come to the US
0:53:35 to produce racism or white supremacy.
0:53:39 They came here to work for free and produce cotton,
0:53:41 for instance, or tobacco.
0:53:45 If we ontologize race and racism,
0:53:48 we will end up in the dead end that we’re describing
0:53:50 and we’ll continuously ask the question,
0:53:52 will we ever get over race?
0:53:54 – I don’t think so.
0:53:58 Am I pessimistic about that?
0:54:02 Yes, I know, but I think that if we reorganize
0:54:06 the ways in which we share the resources of this earth
0:54:07 and protect the planet.
0:54:10 – I think you’re probably right.
0:54:14 That we’ll never get beyond race or racism.
0:54:18 And yet, and I guess maybe this is why
0:54:21 Sisyphus is my political spirit animal,
0:54:25 but we somehow have to accept that
0:54:28 and maybe even be pessimistic on that front.
0:54:32 But that doesn’t mean you have to surrender to spare.
0:54:33 That’s the resignation, I think,
0:54:36 that produces the real dead end.
0:54:39 And I guess the difficulty is towing that line
0:54:42 between being realistic about it,
0:54:46 but also still believing that it’s worth the struggle.
0:54:49 – There are so many reasons why
0:54:56 a lot of humans on this planet wake up every day
0:55:02 and it looks like yesterday, today and tomorrow
0:55:05 are pretty much the same.
0:55:07 Nothing is changing.
0:55:12 So I cannot demand of people
0:55:17 who cannot see any type of concrete change in their lives
0:55:20 to be hopeful.
0:55:23 I mean, who am I?
0:55:25 In order for our hope to be real,
0:55:30 every now and again, you need something to happen
0:55:35 that will change somewhat the circumstances of your life.
0:55:41 And I think if we don’t find a way to do that,
0:55:45 we’re creating a society that actually lead to despair
0:55:48 and chaos and depression.
0:55:52 It’s not just up to the individual to fix themselves.
0:55:56 Yes, in Cameroon, we say that there’s only one seat
0:55:58 in a casket and it’s yours.
0:56:02 Meaning, yes, you come here alone,
0:56:04 you leave this place alone, but then at the same time,
0:56:10 what keeps us going every day?
0:56:12 You need something that keeps you going.
0:56:16 I did some work on the spirituals
0:56:18 and you can see how the enslaved
0:56:20 were trying to understand their experience
0:56:22 in the United States at the time
0:56:28 through a certain kind of theology.
0:56:30 And when you listen to the spirituals,
0:56:34 you can think that there is a lot of despair there.
0:56:37 But it’s not just that.
0:56:41 It’s people wrestling with the facticity
0:56:43 of their human condition.
0:56:48 But at the same time, being aware that there’s so much more
0:56:53 than what is happening to them and holding on to that.
0:56:54 But it’s not easy.
0:57:01 Once again, the book is called Black Existential Freedom.
0:57:04 Natalie Itoke, what a pleasure.
0:57:05 Thanks for doing this.
0:57:06 Thank you so much.
0:57:20 All right, I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.
0:57:23 My only real complaint is that I wish we could have gone longer.
0:57:26 But I did the best I could and there’s a lot there to think about.
0:57:29 And I’d love to hear your thoughts as always.
0:57:33 You can drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:57:36 And if you don’t have time to do that,
0:57:39 then I know you have time to rate, review, subscribe.
0:57:45 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just,
0:57:49 engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact-checked by Melissa Hersh
0:57:52 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:57:55 New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays.
0:57:57 Listen and subscribe.
0:58:00 This show is part of Vox.
0:58:04 Support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
0:58:07 Go to vox.com/members to sign up.
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0:01:16 The history of philosophy is really just the history of various teams
0:01:20 arguing about what’s good or true.
0:01:24 The Epicurean, the empiricist, the stoic, the skeptic,
0:01:29 the positivist, the pragmatist, you get the point.
0:01:33 I’m not an official member of any of these teams,
0:01:38 but if you asked me to pick mine, I’d go with the existentialists.
0:01:48 For me, existentialism was the last great philosophical movement,
0:01:54 and one reason for that is that it emerged at a transformational period in history,
0:01:57 the early to mid-20th century,
0:02:01 headlined by two devastating world wars,
0:02:05 and many of the existentialists were responding to that.
0:02:08 But another reason this movement became so popular is that
0:02:15 its leading proponents didn’t just write arcane academic treatises.
0:02:19 They wrote novels and plays and popular essays,
0:02:22 stuff that real people actually read,
0:02:25 and their ideas crossed over into the culture.
0:02:33 People like Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir
0:02:37 wrote about freedom and responsibility and authenticity,
0:02:44 and their ideas still resonate because the human condition is the same as it’s always been.
0:02:46 But every historical moment is unique,
0:02:50 and so the question is always, how does this tradition,
0:02:55 how does any tradition address our world in the here and now?
0:03:02 I’m Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.
0:03:15 [Music]
0:03:18 Today’s guest is Natalie Itoke.
0:03:21 She’s a professor at the Cooney Graduate Center
0:03:27 and the author of a terrific new book called Black Existential Freedom.
0:03:31 Sometimes I don’t know that I’m looking for a book until I see it,
0:03:33 and this one was like that.
0:03:40 Race and identity have been at the center of our discourse and politics for years now.
0:03:45 But this book engages with these issues through the lens of existentialist thought,
0:03:51 and it feels like a genuinely fresh way into some of these ongoing conversations
0:03:54 about history and racism and freedom.
0:04:00 Which is why I asked Itoke to talk to me about it.
0:04:01 And she did.
0:04:04 And I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
0:04:10 Natalie Itoke, welcome to the show.
0:04:12 Thank you for having me.
0:04:15 I’m really excited to have this conversation with you.
0:04:21 And I think before we get to the story you want to tell in this book,
0:04:28 I’d like to do just a little philosophical table setting for the audience.
0:04:32 What does existentialism mean to you?
0:04:35 How do you approach this tradition of thought?
0:04:42 Well, I come from the French / Francophone schooling background.
0:04:45 So I was exposed to philosophy in high school.
0:04:51 Right away, I just found the questions that philosophers were asking very interesting.
0:04:53 I read Jean-Paul Sartre being a nothingness.
0:04:55 I read some Kierkegaard.
0:04:57 I read Camus.
0:05:03 So in general, questions of existence were always part of my thinking process.
0:05:09 But there’s something about existing as a black person
0:05:12 in the context of white supremacist capitalist society
0:05:16 and the overall idea of the dehumanization of black people.
0:05:24 Which thinkers like Du Bois, Fanon, Ralph Ellison also helped me think about.
0:05:29 So you have the traditional existentialist school when you think about the white thinkers.
0:05:34 But honestly, when you think about African writers and diasporic African writers
0:05:38 who did not present themselves as philosophers,
0:05:44 you continuously have them engaging the question of existing as a black person.
0:05:48 Those writers don’t have to label themselves existentialists.
0:05:49 You know, academics, that’s our job.
0:05:54 We create boxes and categories because for some reason we’ve been trained to think
0:05:58 that if we don’t come up with a taxonomy, we cannot be analytical.
0:06:01 Of all those great lights in that tradition,
0:06:07 which of the thinkers, which of the writers spoke to you most personally?
0:06:10 Oh, the question of freedom is essential to me.
0:06:18 So when Sartre talks about this idea that to exist as a human being,
0:06:23 all human beings are condemned to freedom, that speaks to me right away.
0:06:30 When Sorin Cochegard describes anxiety being the vertical, the dizziness of freedom,
0:06:36 that also speaks to me directly because I always think about what does it take
0:06:40 to be free in the context of slavery, for instance.
0:06:46 The issue is not freedom necessarily, it’s the consciousness of your freedom
0:06:51 and knowing what you have to risk and what you can lose in the process of trying to be free.
0:06:57 So reading people like Cochegard and also to a certain extent,
0:07:01 Aldo Camus never really said that he was a philosopher of the absurd,
0:07:03 absurd in French.
0:07:07 The question of what, how do you find meaning?
0:07:10 The question of meaning and meaninglessness.
0:07:14 Again, thinking about oppression.
0:07:23 What gives meaning to your life when it looks like freedom is totally out of reach?
0:07:29 The last episode we recorded, actually, it was on Camus who I wrote my dissertation on.
0:07:36 And I know he, he insisted he was neither an existentialist nor a philosopher, but he was both.
0:07:38 I don’t care what he says, he was both.
0:07:39 We claim it, we claim it.
0:07:40 That’s right.
0:07:43 He’s on our team, whether he wants to be or not.
0:07:44 You know, it’s so interesting.
0:07:53 All of the existentialists were obviously committed to and concerned with freedom and responsibility.
0:07:53 Yes.
0:07:55 And that’s partly what people dig about it.
0:07:59 But I always feel, I’m curious if you feel the same way,
0:08:05 there’s a tendency to focus too much on the freedom part and not enough on the responsibility part.
0:08:10 Because if you take seriously the idea that we’re truly free,
0:08:17 then you’re immediately confronted with other questions like, what are we to do with that freedom?
0:08:19 What responsibilities does it carry?
0:08:23 And what happens when we flee those responsibilities?
0:08:29 I just love that the existentialist took those questions so seriously.
0:08:32 That’s also one of the reasons why they work with me.
0:08:37 Because, you know, there are ways in which in the Western framework,
0:08:41 people will talk about human rights in French.
0:08:44 The people will talk about the founding fathers.
0:08:49 So they have those lofty interpretations of freedom.
0:08:54 And it seems like freedom is something, yes, you fought for it, you gain it.
0:08:59 And then you sit down, usually a bunch of white males.
0:09:02 You sit down and you put something in paper.
0:09:06 But when you’re coming from the Haitian perspective,
0:09:09 when you think about Nick Turner, when you think about Fredric Douglas,
0:09:11 when you think about all these people,
0:09:14 it’s really about the question of responsibility.
0:09:17 And it starts with the individual and then it becomes collective.
0:09:23 You don’t have this conflict or discrepancy between freedom and responsibility.
0:09:28 When you’re looking at freedom from the perspective of un-freedom,
0:09:30 you have to be responsible.
0:09:32 And now we’re getting into your book,
0:09:36 which is about existentialism and the Black experience.
0:09:42 I mean, is there something unique about the historical Black experience
0:09:45 that makes it a good fit for existentialism?
0:09:48 Or maybe it’s better to reverse that a little bit and ask,
0:09:50 is there something about the historical Black experience
0:09:55 that informs or expands existentialist philosophy?
0:10:00 Yes, the question that I really ask is the following one.
0:10:07 What does it mean to be human when you’ve been historically dehumanized?
0:10:10 And regardless of where you find yourself on this globe,
0:10:14 you will see that people with darker skin are at the bottom.
0:10:19 So there’s something about this legacy of dehumanization
0:10:23 that creates an existential tension.
0:10:27 Of course, it manifests differently depending on where you find yourself.
0:10:30 So I was born in Paris, France,
0:10:33 but I was raised in Cameroon, Central Africa.
0:10:35 And I grew up there.
0:10:41 So I never thought of me as being non-human or as being Black.
0:10:48 But once you move to a space where the majority population is white
0:10:50 and the interaction you have with people
0:10:52 make you realize that you are the other,
0:10:55 although you never really see yourself as being the other,
0:10:59 you realize that although race is a racial construct,
0:11:01 it’s a lived experience.
0:11:04 For whatever reason, even in this country,
0:11:09 citizenship is not enough to be part of the nation.
0:11:14 Once you’ve been defined as non-human,
0:11:17 what can you tell to those who think that they are human
0:11:19 what it means to be human?
0:11:23 Because what they don’t realize is that they too have done something to their humanity.
0:11:26 Fanon wrote about it, Césaire wrote about it.
0:11:29 It says, “And I’m paraphrasing that to dehumanize the others,
0:11:31 they dehumanize oneself.”
0:11:34 So the question of dehumanization/being human
0:11:38 is still at the core of Black existential thought.
0:11:41 I have to be honest, when I first started your book,
0:11:45 I think I had this maybe vague skepticism in the back of my mind.
0:11:48 I was thinking, why Black existentialism?
0:11:49 Why not just existentialism?
0:11:53 Because existentialism is about the universal human experience.
0:11:56 So what does it even mean to say Black existentialism?
0:11:59 But then your book very quickly drives home the reminder
0:12:02 that we have this tradition of Western thought
0:12:05 and part of the history of that tradition
0:12:08 is the devaluing of Black humanity.
0:12:11 And that dehumanization is part of the historical Black experience.
0:12:16 That sense of exile is part of that experience, in the West at least.
0:12:20 And so there’s just no way to engage with a tradition like this one
0:12:24 without also dealing with that history.
0:12:25 Exactly.
0:12:29 Even in the African context, you know, because we are conditioned
0:12:35 to think about the question of the human and racism only in racial terms.
0:12:41 But when you think about the fact that the banchanization of Africa
0:12:46 occurred in Germany in 1884
0:12:50 and that not a single person of African descent was invited.
0:12:55 So whatever countries we inhabit today,
0:13:01 they became our countries through the process of dispossession and imperialism.
0:13:05 So for instance, Cameroon, the way we spell it today,
0:13:12 came from Cameroas because the Portuguese were the first one to show up there.
0:13:15 And in Cameroas, they saw a lot of big shrimps.
0:13:17 So basically, I’m a big shrimp.
0:13:19 That’s, you know.
0:13:22 And to me, that’s the beginning of the humanization right there,
0:13:27 because people claim a land and they act as if the people they find
0:13:30 on that land are of no value.
0:13:32 So they rename the place.
0:13:34 They balkanize the entire place.
0:13:39 And there we are today still trying to make sense of those spaces.
0:13:44 So it’s not just white versus black.
0:13:46 It’s geopolitics.
0:13:50 It’s the political economy and the people who live there.
0:13:53 They’re going to be enslaved or they’re going to work for us.
0:13:55 And we’re going to use the land.
0:13:59 So it’s not just what we think about when we think about existence
0:14:00 from this universal perspective.
0:14:02 It’s not universal.
0:14:04 Yes, oppression happens everywhere.
0:14:08 But the outcome is very different depending on your positionality
0:14:10 in the in world history, you know.
0:14:14 Well, as you say in the book, you’ve been air quotes black
0:14:16 on three different continents.
0:14:19 In this part of the book and your experiences,
0:14:22 maybe the most interesting and clarifying for me.
0:14:26 So I do want to linger on it for a little bit.
0:14:30 How does your sense of self vary from one place to another?
0:14:36 And what are those differences say about how identity and race
0:14:39 and culture really work?
0:14:43 Yes, my parents met in Paris because they’re part
0:14:45 of the colonial/postcolonial experience.
0:14:50 At the time, it was very common for French-speaking colonized
0:14:54 Africans to end up in France.
0:14:58 After they were done with college, they moved back to Cameroon.
0:15:01 And I was, what, two or three years old?
0:15:05 So I did not have the time to develop a racial consciousness
0:15:09 in France because I basically became whoever I became
0:15:13 as a human being in Cameroon, a country where,
0:15:18 because the majority population is black, everybody is black,
0:15:20 therefore no one is.
0:15:25 So you don’t have to think about race.
0:15:28 Yes, you see white people, but they’re a minority
0:15:33 and they do not disrupt your everyday life.
0:15:37 So when I think about police brutality, for instance,
0:15:40 the first image of police brutality,
0:15:46 it’s the oppressive Cameroonian police state oppressing
0:15:48 other Cameroonian.
0:15:50 So I have more of a class consciousness
0:15:56 because wealth disparities in Sub-Saharan Africa are just
0:15:57 unbelievable.
0:16:01 Fast forward, I moved to France to go to college.
0:16:06 You move to a majority white country.
0:16:08 And although French is the language
0:16:11 that I always spoke with my parents,
0:16:14 people start complimenting you on your French.
0:16:22 So it’s a little bit odd, or people start wondering,
0:16:25 why is it that maybe you’re smart or you know certain things
0:16:28 and they ask you, are you God there?
0:16:32 So at first, it’s not really an understanding of blackness,
0:16:35 per se, from this academic perspective.
0:16:38 It’s really the kind of question you’re being asked.
0:16:39 And also the fact that in Cameroon,
0:16:44 yes, we talked about colonization in history course,
0:16:46 but we did not really dwell on that.
0:16:47 So I moved to France.
0:16:51 Then I realized that your way of understanding the world,
0:16:53 your way of understanding yourself,
0:16:56 goes through a certain kind of French ideological filter
0:16:58 that you are not aware of.
0:17:01 And also in France, we have what they call universalism,
0:17:03 a French universalism.
0:17:08 French people do not believe that race is real, per se,
0:17:11 or even a social construct.
0:17:15 They have a very strange approach to history.
0:17:17 So for instance, when I was in France,
0:17:21 they celebrated the abolition of slavery.
0:17:25 You see, the key word here is not slavery, it’s abolition.
0:17:30 And the focus was on victor shall share, or white abolitionists.
0:17:33 So at the end of the day, we were taught in condition
0:17:36 to celebrate this white guy.
0:17:39 And the history of black resistance in the French Caribbean
0:17:42 was totally repressed and erased.
0:17:45 And every time you brought up race,
0:17:48 people would not hear you.
0:17:51 So even in the French context, you see something is odd,
0:17:53 but you don’t have the tools to engage it
0:17:58 because society at large is living in a state of denial.
0:18:00 Then I moved to the US, and I discovered
0:18:04 what I call the Africana Library with all these African-American
0:18:05 thinkers.
0:18:10 And I operate a return to African history
0:18:14 and French colonization and identity
0:18:18 because I was exposed to this way of thinking about the self
0:18:20 in a historical context.
0:18:23 So these are kind of the three ways in which
0:18:27 I engage those spaces in my work.
0:18:30 Yeah, a relevant passage from your book
0:18:33 that I’ll just read if you don’t mind.
0:18:36 And now I’m quoting, “I don’t speak the language,
0:18:39 but I will never forget when I found out
0:18:43 that in Haitian Creole, the word “neg” does not mean black,
0:18:46 it means man, it means human.
0:18:49 And I was thinking, these people have something
0:18:53 that we lost because in Haiti, you can be a negre blanc.
0:18:56 You’re just a human who happens to be white.
0:18:58 This idea that these people who were enslaved
0:19:01 created a language where neg means human really
0:19:03 turned my world upside down.
0:19:07 Once you start thinking that way about that word
0:19:10 and the condition of being human from that perspective,
0:19:15 it really changes the conversation.”
0:19:16 That is fascinating.
0:19:18 How did that word and thinking about the condition
0:19:21 of being human from that perspective
0:19:24 change the conversation for you?
0:19:26 Well, it totally changed the conversation
0:19:32 because in French, the “en-word” is not necessarily
0:19:34 the word “neg.”
0:19:36 “Black” could be “negre.”
0:19:39 You’re just describing somebody’s skin color.
0:19:41 But then you also have phrases such like,
0:19:45 “travailler comme un negre” to work like an “en-word,”
0:19:49 which to me, you have to directly trace it back
0:19:54 to unpaid labor and being enslaved.
0:19:58 In the American context, you have this evolution
0:20:00 in terms of the tenementology.
0:20:02 So we know what the “en-word” is.
0:20:03 It’s a derogatory term.
0:20:05 But in the context of Haiti, we’re
0:20:12 talking about creole, a kind of language which, by definition,
0:20:18 has to do with hybridity and mixing different cultural
0:20:20 and linguistic legacy.
0:20:26 So you see that the word “neg,” “ne-g,” comes
0:20:29 from the French word “negre.”
0:20:33 But they totally reinvented the meaning of that word.
0:20:38 It wasn’t used to describe the condition of the enslaved
0:20:42 or an enslaved person.
0:20:45 It means human.
0:20:47 And there is no surprise.
0:20:52 That’s also where the first black republic was born.
0:20:56 So there’s something about Haiti, that word,
0:21:02 and the question of freedom that helped me revisit
0:21:07 the black experience in the context of oppression.
0:21:09 There’s another passage that I’m thinking of now,
0:21:12 and I’m going to read that as well.
0:21:14 Again, if you don’t mind–
0:21:15 Please go ahead.
0:21:17 You wrote– and now I’m quoting–
0:21:19 “What makes black existentialism very unique
0:21:23 is this situation of despair, and tragedy,
0:21:25 and ontological catastrophe that you constantly
0:21:29 have to engage, not only from an existentialist standpoint,
0:21:32 but in the material conditions of your life.”
0:21:34 So when I look at the ways black immigrants are treated,
0:21:37 whether we’re talking about Europe or America today,
0:21:43 I ask, what is there that makes their exclusion unique?
0:21:45 What is your answer to that question?
0:21:48 What does it mean for you to exercise freedom
0:21:50 in the context of oppression?
0:21:52 And how is that different from exercising freedom
0:21:56 when you occupy the favored or dominant position
0:21:57 in a society?
0:21:58 It’s very simple.
0:22:02 For people who are oppressed, and this is not just black people,
0:22:04 freedom is in the struggle.
0:22:06 The victory is in the struggle.
0:22:08 Nothing will be given to you.
0:22:10 You have to fight for it.
0:22:14 Once you surrender to your circumstances, you defeat it.
0:22:18 So people can look at black immigrants
0:22:20 and come up with all kind of narratives.
0:22:23 But personally, from an existential perspective,
0:22:26 I see a certain kind of struggle to be free.
0:22:29 The question is, that freedom cannot be
0:22:32 divorced from the material conditions of the people’s
0:22:33 lives.
0:22:41 [MUSIC PLAYING]
0:22:44 After a short break, we’ll talk about avoiding
0:22:47 the traps of pessimism.
0:22:49 Stay with us.
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0:26:28 There’s a term you use in the book, Afro-pessimism.
0:26:29 What does that refer to?
0:26:32 And is the argument you’re making in this book
0:26:36 opposed to this or is the relationship more complicated?
0:26:41 It’s very interesting because depending on the reader,
0:26:44 I get two different types of responses.
0:26:49 Some people read my work as a response to Afro-pessimism.
0:26:54 Other people read it as a way to engage Afro-pessimism
0:26:57 but from a different perspective.
0:27:02 But what Afro-pessimism does is basically focusing
0:27:07 on the fact that there is a continuous
0:27:12 and ongoing process of dehumanization
0:27:14 that people of African descent go through.
0:27:19 And in many ways, there’s no way we can be fully human
0:27:24 because we make everybody else human.
0:27:27 In other words, it’s the dehumanization
0:27:30 of people of African descent that makes other people human.
0:27:35 And they talk about a certain kind of ontological catastrophe.
0:27:40 So I do not necessarily disagree with that perspective
0:27:44 but I just reverse the paradigm.
0:27:49 I focus on the ongoing struggle for freedom.
0:27:53 So I’m not dismissing the reality of white supremacy.
0:27:55 I’m not dismissing the reality
0:27:58 of the dehumanization of black people.
0:28:03 I’m not dismissing the material conditions of our lives
0:28:06 but I’m looking at it from the perspective of those
0:28:11 who for a very long time had to fight in order to exist.
0:28:14 – But at the very beginning of the book,
0:28:19 you say explicitly that blackness is not synonymous
0:28:23 with victimhood.
0:28:26 Why was it important to state that so clearly?
0:28:30 – Well, because I think historically people of African descent
0:28:32 have been victimized.
0:28:37 So they are victims, but at the same time,
0:28:42 the other side of the story is that they always try
0:28:45 to find a way to free themselves.
0:28:47 I cannot separate the two.
0:28:52 So that’s why I draw the line between being historically
0:28:57 victimized and being a victim and the state of victimhood.
0:28:59 And in the work that I do,
0:29:03 I am not necessarily saying that that’s it.
0:29:07 They are free and it’s a difficult argument to make
0:29:11 but I’m trying to examine the ways in which you cannot think
0:29:16 about black freedom without this question of the struggle.
0:29:21 And it’s not even just in the US or in France
0:29:25 when I think about what’s happening in sub-Saharan Africa,
0:29:30 you know, the dictatorships and the many ways
0:29:35 in which neocolonialism and the setting up of a power structure
0:29:40 that still oppress Africans is happening at the moment.
0:29:44 People are still trying to be free.
0:29:47 So, and to me, I’m not just being pessimistic.
0:29:50 It’s just the facts of our black life.
0:29:55 It’s how you deal with it and continuously you still trying
0:29:59 to improve the conditions of your lives, right?
0:30:03 Whereas the Afro-Pessimists will say that, you know,
0:30:08 there’s no point talking about the struggle
0:30:10 because at the end of the day,
0:30:13 why should you even be struggling in the first place?
0:30:15 – Well, this is getting to the tension for me,
0:30:16 one of the tensions at least.
0:30:21 There is a certain pessimism to just stick with that word
0:30:26 that I feel in so much of the race discourse in America.
0:30:28 And I just don’t know what to do with it.
0:30:31 And I can try to explain what I mean.
0:30:37 So I’m a white guy who grew up in the deep South.
0:30:40 That’s just a fact about me.
0:30:43 And I’m not saying that in some performative perfunctory way.
0:30:46 I’m just acknowledging that that’s my experience.
0:30:50 And it places some kind of limit
0:30:52 on how much I can understand the experience
0:30:55 of someone with a totally different life.
0:31:00 But I also believe in the universality
0:31:02 of the human condition and the power of language
0:31:06 and ideas to bridge differences.
0:31:09 And when the pessimism goes too far
0:31:14 or when we become trapped in our given identities,
0:31:20 we sacrifice our agency on some level.
0:31:23 We sacrifice our ability to define ourselves
0:31:24 in the here and now
0:31:27 and project ourselves into a better future.
0:31:29 But at the same time, we are products
0:31:33 of material and historical forces.
0:31:37 How do we accept the all too real constraints
0:31:39 imposed on us by history
0:31:42 without at the same time reducing ourselves
0:31:45 to historical props?
0:31:49 I always go back to the lived experience
0:31:54 because African people or people of African descent
0:31:55 are not concepts.
0:32:01 I honestly believe that every day when someone wakes up,
0:32:04 they try to figure out what they have to do,
0:32:06 how to go about it.
0:32:09 And, you know, it’s not an academic matter.
0:32:11 It’s very concrete.
0:32:14 It doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be facing
0:32:17 difficulties, challenges, problems.
0:32:22 But you still go about your life
0:32:26 because that’s the life you were given to live, you know?
0:32:30 But I also think a little paraphrase Gramsci that,
0:32:32 you know, you need to strike a balance
0:32:35 between the pessimism of the intellect
0:32:38 and the optimism of the will.
0:32:42 Because looking at reality, to me,
0:32:45 is not a matter of being pessimistic or optimistic.
0:32:48 You need to be able to deal with reality.
0:32:51 Otherwise, there’s a flight from responsibility.
0:32:56 So once you’re able to look at a situation for what it is
0:32:59 and you don’t lie to yourself,
0:33:03 you’re able to look at death straight in the eyes,
0:33:04 you’re able to deal with it.
0:33:08 And this is not some grandiose philosophical statement.
0:33:11 I see that every time I go back to Cameroon,
0:33:13 coming from a perspective of somebody
0:33:16 who has lived most of her life overseas,
0:33:18 yes, you can come and be like, oh my God,
0:33:19 these people are suffering.
0:33:21 They don’t have this, they don’t have that.
0:33:25 So you can look at their daily lives
0:33:29 from a perspective of lack and deficiency.
0:33:32 But that is not how they’re living their lives.
0:33:37 They’re still trying to work whatever job they can do.
0:33:39 They’re still having children.
0:33:42 They’re still having a certain kind of joy.
0:33:44 Horrible things happen to them,
0:33:49 but they don’t sit in a state of pessimism and paralysis.
0:33:54 To the contrary, sometimes I wonder,
0:33:59 because I’m thinking, is this some kind of active nihilism?
0:34:04 Like you keep on pushing, just like Sisyphus,
0:34:06 to go back to Camus and the meat of Sisyphus.
0:34:08 It tells us that we have to imagine
0:34:12 that Sisyphus is happy and his happiness is in that rock
0:34:14 and the fact that he has the strength to push it.
0:34:15 But then at the same time,
0:34:20 I’m also fully aware that life could be so much better,
0:34:22 so much different.
0:34:25 If from a political standpoint,
0:34:27 what about redistributing the wealth
0:34:28 in a certain kind of way?
0:34:32 What about making sure that people have decent housing,
0:34:33 free healthcare?
0:34:36 So you see, that’s why I’m constantly engaging
0:34:38 the material conditions of our lives,
0:34:40 but at the same time,
0:34:45 I’m aware of the fact that people are continuously
0:34:48 also trying to improve the material conditions of our life,
0:34:50 but it’s not just up to the individual.
0:34:52 That’s what the political comes in.
0:34:55 And I cannot afford to be pessimistic also
0:34:58 because all the people who came before me
0:35:01 of what people of African descent in this country
0:35:05 had to endure and fight for and open the door.
0:35:09 When it seems like everything was dark
0:35:12 and there was no hope, you know?
0:35:16 So, and I also think about the freedom fighters in Cameroon.
0:35:18 All those people who believed in freedom
0:35:22 and who were killed, had those people not believe
0:35:25 and had they not fought, where would I be today?
0:35:28 So that’s where I also find a certain kind of hope.
0:35:29 – I love the line in the book
0:35:32 about people of African descent or Sisyphian,
0:35:33 whether they like it or not.
0:35:34 – Yeah.
0:35:38 – I love it because Sisyphus symbolizes
0:35:40 this dual reality that you’re talking about, right?
0:35:43 That suffering and loss are objective realities,
0:35:45 but so is the choice to affirm life
0:35:49 and make that goddamn boulder your own.
0:35:52 – Yeah, and honestly, I can look at it
0:35:53 from the aproposimist perspective
0:35:58 and I can totally understand how, you know, what’s the point?
0:36:02 – I mean, some of this gets at the ambivalence.
0:36:06 I felt reading someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates
0:36:10 who writes beautifully and in a way
0:36:14 that helps me understand his experience.
0:36:18 What I wrestled with was the philosophy of hopelessness
0:36:21 that seemed to undergird it.
0:36:22 On some level, I get it.
0:36:27 The black experience in America is perpetual struggle,
0:36:29 but I can’t help the fact that it strikes me
0:36:31 as a form of resignation.
0:36:34 I think it yields too much to the forces of oppression.
0:36:37 There’s no exit, as Sartre would say.
0:36:39 But I don’t know, do you think I’m misunderstanding
0:36:41 the point there?
0:36:43 – Well, yes and no, because remember
0:36:47 that people of African descent in the United States,
0:36:49 and I’m paraphrasing Baldwin here,
0:36:52 they are the only people who never want to come here.
0:36:55 So they didn’t come here because they had a dream
0:36:59 or they tried to improve their living conditions
0:37:01 and they’ve been through hell.
0:37:02 And they stay going through hell.
0:37:04 There’s a certain kind of legacy.
0:37:09 We’re talking about at least 250 years of free labor.
0:37:13 We’re talking about Jim Crow laws.
0:37:15 We’re talking about lynching.
0:37:19 So I cannot say that Ta-Nehisi Coates
0:37:21 is a preacher of hopelessness per se,
0:37:23 because in the United States,
0:37:27 there’s also this obsession with hope and happy endings,
0:37:30 which I do not have because I come from a French
0:37:32 slash Francophone background.
0:37:35 When you watch a French movie for an hour and a half
0:37:37 or two hours and the movie ends,
0:37:39 you’re just like, what happened here?
0:37:40 (laughs)
0:37:42 What did I just watch?
0:37:46 But you look at, American movies is,
0:37:48 you always have the dualities and the binaries,
0:37:51 the good guys and the bad guys.
0:37:55 And you always need an happy ending.
0:37:59 There’s this obsession with, we need to find hope.
0:38:00 Where is hope?
0:38:02 That’s why I love the blues,
0:38:05 because the blues is an African-American art form
0:38:11 that helps you deal with the dissonance of your existence.
0:38:14 And you cannot be in denial of your reality,
0:38:16 but you have to be responsible about it.
0:38:18 You can be humoristic about it.
0:38:20 You can have a sense of irony.
0:38:22 And when you listen to some blues songs,
0:38:26 you can see that the lyrics can be sad or tragic,
0:38:28 but the melody is upbeat.
0:38:32 What is the blues singer expressing?
0:38:34 Joy, happiness, hope?
0:38:36 Is expressing an existential struggle?
0:38:43 – I wonder what you think is the principal struggle today
0:38:49 and where freedom is to be found in that
0:38:52 for black people in this country at least,
0:38:53 ’cause that’s where we are.
0:38:58 – When you think about the ’60s and the ’70s,
0:39:02 the black struggle was not just for black people.
0:39:04 It was universal.
0:39:09 Most of those black leaders were Marxist or leftist.
0:39:11 They were also anti-capitalist.
0:39:14 It wasn’t just anti-racism.
0:39:16 I think the difficulty today
0:39:20 is not necessarily just the question of freedom,
0:39:25 is the fact that leftist politics,
0:39:27 first of all, is divided.
0:39:29 You have the cultural left
0:39:32 and then you have the left that focuses on class,
0:39:36 but also there is this neoliberalization
0:39:38 of identity discourse.
0:39:41 Therefore, the question I have is,
0:39:45 are we fighting or are we framing freedom
0:39:50 in terms of becoming part of a system
0:39:55 which by definition reproduced inequality?
0:39:57 If that’s what we’re claiming,
0:40:02 you’re going to create a minority elite class
0:40:06 and then they will be part of this world as it is,
0:40:09 but I am told that it is progress
0:40:12 because now you have more black people here,
0:40:14 more black people there,
0:40:17 or do you want to create a world
0:40:21 that is difficult to actually create
0:40:26 because we all have to lose and risk everything.
0:40:29 And I’m including there the black bourgeois.
0:40:30 (laughs)
0:40:32 So I think the question today
0:40:34 is not some abstract freedom.
0:40:38 It’s connected to the material conditions of our lives.
0:40:41 And it’s not an American problem,
0:40:43 but I think that in the US,
0:40:44 and maybe I’m biased
0:40:47 because I come from all these different spaces,
0:40:50 we are very used to just look at issues
0:40:53 from a certain parochial perspective.
0:40:55 Like we can fix problems
0:40:58 that are actually global locally.
0:41:00 No, it’s going to take more.
0:41:03 That is also the reason why the murder of George Floyd,
0:41:08 for instance, was used in Sub-Saharan Africa by activists
0:41:12 to challenge the police states and police brutality.
0:41:15 At first I thought it was odd
0:41:17 because of course in the US context,
0:41:20 you think about race and racism,
0:41:23 but then in the African context,
0:41:24 you think about, well,
0:41:27 the relationship between the state,
0:41:30 violence and disciplining citizens.
0:41:34 George Floyd belongs to a category of people
0:41:36 that Sylvia Winter wrote about
0:41:41 in her essay titled “No Human Involve”.
0:41:44 Basically, that was the qualifier
0:41:47 that the LAPD used in the ’90s
0:41:52 to describe an unemployed black male
0:41:56 who were involved in petty crimes, more or less,
0:42:00 and who were also high school dropout.
0:42:03 And she wrote that essay more than,
0:42:04 was it in the, it wasn’t in the ’90s,
0:42:07 it was after the Rodney King situation.
0:42:12 Asking black academics, what language can we use?
0:42:15 What type of framework can you create
0:42:20 to actually talk about the ratchet of the earth?
0:42:22 And she was talking about this specific class of people.
0:42:26 – You look at a movement like Black Lives Matter,
0:42:31 which in 2020 really gathered a lot of steam
0:42:33 and a lot of support,
0:42:36 but then you fast forward the clock
0:42:37 a few years into the future
0:42:40 and what did it yield materially?
0:42:43 Not much, the material conditions
0:42:46 of black people in this country
0:42:50 are not better than they were five years ago.
0:42:54 – Well, to me, I think the challenges today
0:42:55 are just very different.
0:43:00 So there are ways in which today
0:43:04 some people believe that capitalism
0:43:10 and activism can lead to some kind of freedom.
0:43:18 You have the neoliberalization of the black freedom struggle.
0:43:20 It’s not necessarily about the movement,
0:43:24 it’s about the dynamics of capitalism
0:43:28 in the context of the black freedom struggle.
0:43:33 Today, can we really have a genuine political movement
0:43:38 that does not in real concrete terms
0:43:42 address capitalism and the material conditions
0:43:44 in terms of your platform,
0:43:47 in terms of what you’re advocating for?
0:43:50 And I think that’s the tension today.
0:43:54 How do we reinvent grassroots organizing?
0:43:57 And when you have all those billionaires
0:44:01 giving money to movements,
0:44:05 is it an oxymoron to even combine the two?
0:44:08 Apparently not, but I think that’s also why
0:44:11 those movements are not successful per se.
0:44:14 I heard you say something along these lines
0:44:16 in another interview where you were talking about
0:44:20 how we engage the issue of identity in this culture,
0:44:23 that it’s all about who you are
0:44:27 instead of the relationship you have with other people.
0:44:31 – Yes, but the saddest thing is,
0:44:34 I don’t know, we can reverse the discourse
0:44:39 because it creates a certain kind of competition
0:44:41 amongst groups that are oppressed.
0:44:46 And then the conversation is, what is this fight really about?
0:44:51 Is it about freedom or access?
0:44:56 Because I don’t believe that I can be free by myself
0:44:59 or one group can be free,
0:45:02 whereas the other group is not free.
0:45:05 It’s very complicated when you have a society
0:45:09 that is organized with different groups.
0:45:12 Yes, you have the master categories, whiteness.
0:45:16 But whiteness is a name for so many things.
0:45:19 People are usually talking about wealth.
0:45:21 They’re talking about access.
0:45:26 They’re talking about things that are very concrete.
0:45:28 So what are people fighting for?
0:45:32 They’re fighting for access, for resources,
0:45:34 and you’re using identity
0:45:37 because that’s the way this society was built.
0:45:38 That’s why it’s also very difficult
0:45:41 to talk about solidarity sometimes.
0:45:43 – When you look around here
0:45:46 or anywhere else in the world for that matter,
0:45:51 do you see concrete examples of emancipatory politics
0:45:55 that we could actually build on?
0:45:57 – That’s a difficult question
0:46:00 because what is emancipatory politics?
0:46:06 For instance, I went to college in France, right?
0:46:08 And it was pretty much free.
0:46:11 And I also have free healthcare.
0:46:14 And a lot of European countries
0:46:17 promote a certain kind of social democracy.
0:46:20 So moving to the US
0:46:23 and looking at the ways in which here
0:46:27 you pretty much on your own for everything,
0:46:33 the European political context can look progressive,
0:46:38 but we also see that even there is not working anymore.
0:46:41 And I also see places where the states,
0:46:43 they basically do not care at all.
0:46:47 So I know this is going to sound strange
0:46:49 and I don’t know what it would look like,
0:46:51 but I think we need a global revolution.
0:46:55 It sounds very abstract,
0:47:00 but I will be a little bit dishonest if I were to tell you
0:47:03 this is working here and this is working there.
0:47:06 – You were talking earlier about
0:47:09 the various factions within the left.
0:47:14 And I suppose I’ve always been in the old school
0:47:18 materialist camp and the political frustration for me
0:47:24 when it comes to race is how often it’s used as a tool
0:47:27 to undermine the solidarity we actually need.
0:47:31 I guess this also gets to the political traps
0:47:33 of neoliberalism.
0:47:37 And it’s part of what makes fascism so vexing.
0:47:41 It weaponizes existing grievances
0:47:45 while at the same time reinforcing the conditions
0:47:49 that brought about those grievances.
0:47:52 And that’s the loop we’ve got to get out of.
0:47:53 – It’s funny, you’re bringing this up
0:47:55 two days ago in my class,
0:48:00 we had a conversation about race reductionism
0:48:04 versus class reductionism.
0:48:05 And I think that’s the problem.
0:48:08 I think they intersect.
0:48:11 You cannot necessarily separate the two.
0:48:15 The problem is when you start essentializing
0:48:20 each qualifier and it becomes either or
0:48:22 particularly in the American context.
0:48:25 You’re right, that’s also part of the problem.
0:48:32 – After one more short break,
0:48:36 hear more of my conversation with Natalie Itoque.
0:48:37 Stay with us.
0:48:39 (upbeat music)
0:48:58 – The white chocolate macadamia cream cold brew
0:49:00 is back for the summer at Starbucks.
0:49:02 So bold and so dreamy.
0:49:05 It’s the coolest co-pilot for wherever the sunshine takes you.
0:49:07 Embrace the chill.
0:49:10 The silky cold foam of that anticipated first sip.
0:49:13 And join us on summertime only at Starbucks.
0:49:17 – I’m Claire Parker.
0:49:19 – And I’m Ashley Hamilton.
0:49:22 – And this is Celebrity Memoir Book Club.
0:49:26 – A podcast that says what if your must read book list
0:49:29 and your absolutely must not read book list got married?
0:49:31 If you’ve ever seen a celebrity memoir
0:49:33 and thought what could they possibly write about?
0:49:35 – The answer a lot of times is nothing.
0:49:37 So we have to make up the jokes to fill in the blanks.
0:49:39 – Yeah, so if you wanna know what’s in there,
0:49:42 but you don’t wanna waste your eyeballs’ strength,
0:49:43 we’re gonna tell you what’s in it.
0:49:45 So hop along for the ride.
0:49:46 – Who are we?
0:49:47 We are two best friends and two comedians
0:49:50 who had enough time to read a full book a week.
0:49:51 – We live in New York,
0:49:53 so we think we know everything about everything
0:49:55 and we’re gonna tell you what’s what.
0:49:57 – And if we’re wrong, that’s part of the fun.
0:50:00 – So if you are interested in celebrities,
0:50:04 in literature, in a good time with your pals,
0:50:07 tune in to Celebrity Memoir Book Club.
0:50:08 – The podcast where we read the book
0:50:09 so that you don’t have to.
0:50:11 – You can listen to Celebrity Memoir Book Club
0:50:13 wherever you get your podcasts.
0:50:15 – I mean, can’t wait to hang.
0:50:20 – Basically every home in America has a refrigerator.
0:50:23 I mean, you have to have at least one refrigerator
0:50:24 if not more, right?
0:50:26 How else are you gonna keep your food fresh long enough
0:50:28 so you actually eat it?
0:50:30 – Not necessarily.
0:50:32 This episode of “Gastropod,”
0:50:34 how the future of refrigeration
0:50:36 might not involve refrigeration at all.
0:50:38 – These are untreated lemons.
0:50:40 So this is eight weeks old and these are the same age.
0:50:42 So these are treated and these are untreated.
0:50:43 – That’s nuts.
0:50:44 I mean, look at them.
0:50:45 – Pepper’s the same thing.
0:50:47 So untreated and then these are treated
0:50:49 and they’re both the same age.
0:50:51 You should feel it actually, I mean, they’re solid.
0:50:53 – Bell peppers nearly as good as new
0:50:55 after eight weeks at room temperature.
0:50:57 This is a new technology that could help address
0:50:59 one of the most serious offenders
0:51:01 when it comes to global warming, your fridge.
0:51:03 – “Gastropod” has got the story.
0:51:05 Find “Gastropod” and subscribe
0:51:07 wherever you get your podcasts.
0:51:20 – I often feel suspended between the deniers
0:51:23 and the pessimists.
0:51:28 The people who insist racism is a phantasm on the one hand
0:51:32 and the people who insist we can never get beyond it
0:51:33 on the other hand.
0:51:35 The deniers are fools.
0:51:39 And I think the pessimists are dead end.
0:51:42 But I ask you sincerely, as someone who’s thought
0:51:44 about this much more than I have, I mean,
0:51:48 do you think we’ll ever live in a world without racism
0:51:51 or at least a world in which racism is so irrelevant
0:51:55 and confined as to be politically inconsequential?
0:51:58 – No, I don’t think so.
0:52:02 And I’m not just talking about race.
0:52:07 I also come from a place where you have many people
0:52:09 who use the word ethnic groups,
0:52:11 but this is colonial language.
0:52:14 You have different peoples living together.
0:52:21 They share different languages, different cultures,
0:52:24 but the issue is not the difference.
0:52:26 It’s the struggle for resources and access.
0:52:31 So some of the conflicts in the African context
0:52:37 that are continuously framed in terms of ethnic conflicts.
0:52:41 People just fighting because they’re different
0:52:44 or they’re fighting over land or water
0:52:47 or some kind of resources.
0:52:52 And are they using race or the so-called ethnic identity
0:52:55 to create a sense of unity
0:53:00 so that they can bond in order to oppress other people,
0:53:03 i.e. have more resources?
0:53:06 You see, that’s how I think about those issues.
0:53:11 I will always bring into the conversation
0:53:16 the mechanism of power, exploitation and race.
0:53:18 And I will paraphrase Barbara Field.
0:53:19 – Yeah, she’s great.
0:53:24 – She talks about how, okay, racism is real,
0:53:27 but we should be aware of the fact
0:53:31 that people were not enslaved
0:53:32 so that they can come to the US
0:53:35 to produce racism or white supremacy.
0:53:39 They came here to work for free and produce cotton,
0:53:41 for instance, or tobacco.
0:53:45 If we ontologize race and racism,
0:53:48 we will end up in the dead end that we’re describing
0:53:50 and we’ll continuously ask the question,
0:53:52 will we ever get over race?
0:53:54 – I don’t think so.
0:53:58 Am I pessimistic about that?
0:54:02 Yes, I know, but I think that if we reorganize
0:54:06 the ways in which we share the resources of this earth
0:54:07 and protect the planet.
0:54:10 – I think you’re probably right.
0:54:14 That we’ll never get beyond race or racism.
0:54:18 And yet, and I guess maybe this is why
0:54:21 Sisyphus is my political spirit animal,
0:54:25 but we somehow have to accept that
0:54:28 and maybe even be pessimistic on that front.
0:54:32 But that doesn’t mean you have to surrender to spare.
0:54:33 That’s the resignation, I think,
0:54:36 that produces the real dead end.
0:54:39 And I guess the difficulty is towing that line
0:54:42 between being realistic about it,
0:54:46 but also still believing that it’s worth the struggle.
0:54:49 – There are so many reasons why
0:54:56 a lot of humans on this planet wake up every day
0:55:02 and it looks like yesterday, today and tomorrow
0:55:05 are pretty much the same.
0:55:07 Nothing is changing.
0:55:12 So I cannot demand of people
0:55:17 who cannot see any type of concrete change in their lives
0:55:20 to be hopeful.
0:55:23 I mean, who am I?
0:55:25 In order for our hope to be real,
0:55:30 every now and again, you need something to happen
0:55:35 that will change somewhat the circumstances of your life.
0:55:41 And I think if we don’t find a way to do that,
0:55:45 we’re creating a society that actually lead to despair
0:55:48 and chaos and depression.
0:55:52 It’s not just up to the individual to fix themselves.
0:55:56 Yes, in Cameroon, we say that there’s only one seat
0:55:58 in a casket and it’s yours.
0:56:02 Meaning, yes, you come here alone,
0:56:04 you leave this place alone, but then at the same time,
0:56:10 what keeps us going every day?
0:56:12 You need something that keeps you going.
0:56:16 I did some work on the spirituals
0:56:18 and you can see how the enslaved
0:56:20 were trying to understand their experience
0:56:22 in the United States at the time
0:56:28 through a certain kind of theology.
0:56:30 And when you listen to the spirituals,
0:56:34 you can think that there is a lot of despair there.
0:56:37 But it’s not just that.
0:56:41 It’s people wrestling with the facticity
0:56:43 of their human condition.
0:56:48 But at the same time, being aware that there’s so much more
0:56:53 than what is happening to them and holding on to that.
0:56:54 But it’s not easy.
0:57:01 Once again, the book is called Black Existential Freedom.
0:57:04 Natalie Itoke, what a pleasure.
0:57:05 Thanks for doing this.
0:57:06 Thank you so much.
0:57:20 All right, I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did.
0:57:23 My only real complaint is that I wish we could have gone longer.
0:57:26 But I did the best I could and there’s a lot there to think about.
0:57:29 And I’d love to hear your thoughts as always.
0:57:33 You can drop us a line at thegrayarea@vox.com.
0:57:36 And if you don’t have time to do that,
0:57:39 then I know you have time to rate, review, subscribe.
0:57:45 This episode was produced by John Arons, edited by Jorge Just,
0:57:49 engineered by Patrick Boyd, fact-checked by Melissa Hersh
0:57:52 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:57:55 New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays.
0:57:57 Listen and subscribe.
0:58:00 This show is part of Vox.
0:58:04 Support Vox’s journalism by joining our membership program today.
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0:58:17 [BLANK_AUDIO]
Nathalie Etoke joins The Gray Area to talk about existentialism, the Black experience, and the legacy of dehumanization.
Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), host, The Gray Area
Guest: Nathalie Etoke. Her book is Black Existential Freedom.
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